Verizon acknowledges ongoing BlackBerry outages, says fix pending

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Verizon Wireless acknowledged that BlackBerry users on its network have been facing delays and outages with e-mail and data transfers this week, saying that fixes to its network were in the process of rolling out. The company said it was working alongside BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. to investigate the underlying cause of the outage.

‘BlackBerry customers have been experiencing an issue with some delays,’ Verizon spokesman Ken Muche said. ‘We have escalated it with tech folks at RIM and our company on the network side.’

A number of users online, many of whom say they are from California, have reported trouble receiving e-mail and surfing the Web on their devices.

Two days ago, celebrity blogger Perez Hilton joined the chorus of frustrated users when he tweeted that he would switch to a different carrier if Verizon didn’t ‘get your #BlackBerry issues fixed ASAP! Grrrr!’

Similar reports could be found across Twitter and in the blogosphere.

Verizon’s Muche said the company did not yet have a final analysis of the problem. Asked if the outage affected systems on which the upcoming Verizon iPhone would run, he said, ‘I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all. I want to make sure that our root cause analysis is completed before I can give a definitive answer either way.’

Verizon has not yet said if it will offer affected users a credit for the service interruption they experienced.

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-- David Sarno